Cabin Fever (cont.)

I was so carried away with technical problems last time, that I failed to touch on cabin fever. As you can imagine, when one step down takes you from the bedroom to the bathroom and another step forward takes you to the kitchen and one more step forward and you are in the dining room/living room, it does not take a genius to figure out that as comfortable and as well-equipped as those rooms are, they do not give, even an average English or American woman a sense of Lebensraum. If the same space is also your mode of traveling , albeit one more step forward, there is a need at a certain point to stretch the legs and MOVE. Panoramic views from the cockpit are not enough. One cannot live by view alone.

Happily the Germans are a nation of walkers, cyclists, and even runners. The walking element was of course one of the reasons Mark Twain chose Germany in which to become a tramp. The other reasons were his desire to study art (and to learn to paint) and to learn the German language (for the first and the last he could , of course, have also chosen Switzerland or Austria), though some purists might dispute the thought of learning to speak German in Switzerland; Your trampess aspired to much the same on her first excursion around Germany with the tramp in 1972 (in fact the tramp has such fond memories of the trip that our WLW sports a licence plate with the number 7208 – to signify the first trip and the current one). Like The Tramp, I respectfully await the Germans to accept the 8 modifications he respectfully suggested to their language to make it easier on themselves and to make it possible for a foreigner to learn within a lifetime (which even after 100 years they have failed to recognise as sensible – although my tramp, to his credit, totally agreed with them after he recovered from a mild heart attack brought on by severe laughter following his reading of The Tramp’s chapter on the Awful German Language. But then the tramp always prefers to speak English as it is a “clearly superior language” – only a German could make such a logical statement. Perhaps one day, all Germans, compelled by logic, will follow the tramp’s lead, thus obviating the necessity to adopt The Tramp’s helpful suggestions). In the meantime, I do the best I can with a combination of international words and some from Wagner -- how else would I know how to say, “My Hero” to the geek at Media Markt? No doubt The Tramp was hampered in his ability to learn German because he hated Wagner, having dutifully sat through Lohengrin for a mere 4 hours without a moment’s pleasure.

But I digress. The countryside is magnificent and there is nothing like a 10km run through beautiful fields to restore the body and the mind. The small problem of thinking (erroneously) that I was on a track that would take me around town back to where I started was discovered before I was committed to a half marathon (there are only so many allowable paths when one is in the midst of asparagus fields). No doubt the natives thought I was a little crazy – most women my age are on bicycles dressed as mature women should be. I was, of course, in my Nike running gear (winter length – slightly out of place now that it is no longer snowing), i-pod tracking my distance and pace as well as providing the necessary incentive by way of hard hitting rock provided by number three son. After dinner, the tramp and I went on a long walk in a different direction. “Connecting to the earth,” he said, “That’s what this trip is all about.”